The present invention relates to a knitted package of highly elastic yarn from one end of which individual yarn strands can be unravelled for feeding to a textile machine such as a knitting machine where a plurality of yarn ends are simultaneously utilized.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,827,261, assigned to the same Assignee as the present application, there is disclosed an elastic knit yarn package in the form of a flat unravellable web or tape which is produced on a two needle bar warp knitting machine. The yarn package is characterized by the ease with which a number of yarn strands of the package can be unravelled simultaneously and fed with a minimum of entanglements to a textile machine for incorporation into a textile fabric. In addition, the fabric can easily be split to form a package or packages of a lesser number of ends.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,411,142, a similar yarn package is disclosed which is said to be readily splitable into narrower tapes thus reducing waste when fewer ends are required than are provided by a given yarn package. In the stitch pattern, the underlaps do not cross each other or run in opposite directions between the wales of the fabric.
It has been found that the use of the prior art packages with highly elastic yarns of relatively high denier can result in undesirably low feeding speeds which can cause significant losses over a period of time with modern high speed textile fabric forming machines. That is to say, in view of the investment in such machines, it is often unacceptable to textile manufacturers that a specific yarn package can only be unravelled at an unacceptably slow speed that does not permit them to take full advantage of the increased production capacity of their fabric forming machines.
The present invention overcomes the foregoing difficulty particularly with high denier, highly elastic yarn such as spandex, by providing a knit pattern for a ravellable web or yarn package which will permit not only splitting of the tape but also unravelling at increased speeds with such high denier filaments without entanglements between adjacent yarns of the package. In one embodiment, a double faced warp knitted elongated fabric is provided where each yarn is knitted in two successive loops in one wale in successive courses followed by a crossing of the yarn to an adjacent wale and a repeating of the successive two loop pattern. For each yarn, the loops will alternate between the front and back face of the fabric.
With this stitch pattern, a substantially more manageable yarn package for highly elastic yarns of any denier will be obtained as well as a yarn package which can be easily fabricated at higher production speeds on the conventional double needle bar flat bed warp knitting machines.
The foregoing and other advantages of the present invention will become apparent as consideration is given to the following detailed description taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings, in which: